Pardo Lazo
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, Translator: Unstated
The jail guards had a small battery-operated radio, an obsolete gadget
like everything in the Regla police station, on the other side of Havana
bay.
The decor of the interrogation rooms was antediluvian, pure Soviet-style
political propaganda, with quotes from Fidel Castro stuck to his early
icons of the Revolution: the assault on the Moncada Barracks, the
landing of the Granma yacht, Che Guevara's arm in a sling, the
wide-brimmed hat of the late Commander Camilo.
The dungeon looked newly renovated, with a certain look of having been
straightened up by me, which rendered the neatness in terrifying detail.
I felt an inconsolable loneliness in that basement of bars and colossal
locks. I had never been imprisoned, I have no criminal record. In fact,
this time I was hunted like a wild animal in the street. Without
criminal charges against me. Without identification from the commando
that kidnapped me (they never told my family or friends). Without legal
documents for the arrest, seizure of property, and detention for two
days: two days of Pope Benedict XVI in Havana, in a parallel
installation of bliss and barbarism (Kafka 100% flush with the Caribbean
Sea).
On the morning of Tuesday 29 March, on the eve of the Pope's Mass at the
Plaza of the Revolution, the Cuban capital awoke unhinged by a flood of
officers in uniform or civilian clothes. They coagulated traffic. They
coerced and captured countless independent journalists, human rights
activists, political opponents (as well as beggars and unlicensed
vendors). They did so right in the face of the international press
correspondents, all concentrated on the altar of Joseph Ratzinger, or
perhaps in the facial reactions of President Raul Castro before every
subtlety of the papal homily.
From a few days ago, the State telephone companies — ETECSA CUBACEL —
were complicit in the operation unofficially called "Vow of Silence" and
blocked, without any technical reason, thousands of their users' lines,
without notice or right to compensation. They also cut all the very
limited internet service, which in Cuba is the privilege of foreigners
and a certain caste of officials.
From the beginning, I stopped eating and drinking water. Nor did I
responded too much to the personal provocations of an attorney for State
Security, like a character out of the film Minority Report, he wanted to
buy time until the Pope took off for the Vatican, charging me with the
words, without requiring evidence, "subversive activity" and "public
scandal" with "preventative character." Apparently, H.G. Wells' time
machine Wells retains all its functions intact in the Cold War Museum of
Cuban Counterintelligence (or perhaps should be renamed the Cuban
Countercitizenry).
Only one small battery radio, a gadget discontinued at the time of Cuban
socialism, kept me connected to the world beyond our modern catacombs
(the police station is across from the Regla cemetery). So I kept count
of the passing hours (it was the world's most endless night). Thus,
already with symptoms of muscle weakness and lack of glucose in the
brain, I finally heard the chorus of the only liturgical Mass kidnapped
in the history of Catholicism.
It was a sad theater crammed with atheists workers, inspired unions more
Stalinist than Marxist-Leninist, not to mention security personnel
disguised as Red Cross stretcher-bearers or, who knows, as altar boys.
Not even the parishes could choose freely who would attend and who is
not among their faithful, as there were "black lists" with names that
were promptly thrown under the official buses, which were the gateway to
the Plaza of the Revolution: the tribune so often changed into a
tribunal, where the blind masses and the Maximum Leader (excommunicated
by Rome decades ago) have clamored hysterically for "Death to the traitors."
When the Mass of His Holiness Benedict XVI seemed it would never end, I
knelt instinctively and prayed for release from my cell. Not to God, but
to the man Joseph Ratzinger in person. I asked him to abbreviate the
stages of his rhetoric, to skip the Eucharistic formalities, and not to
delay over the diplomatic greetings between the Catholic and Communist
hierarchies, that would not repay the bullying of the Cuban Cardinal's
smile, that the Popemobile leave at top speed from the altar itself
directly to Havana International Airport, so as not to commit heresy, I
prayed that no Pope ever again accept an invitation to repress the poor
people of this or any other country-prison.
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